Steak in Cast Iron

A few years ago, I watched Alton Brown make pan fried chicken on an episode of Good Eats.  It looked really good, and I wanted to try making it myself.  But we didn't have the appropriate hardware:  a large cast iron skillet.  I asked my dear wife to pick one up on her next trip to the store, but made the mistake of telling her to get the biggest one they had.  Expecting a 12-inch model like the one my mom had, I was a bit taken aback by this behemoth:

It's over 15 inches in diameter, which means that almost 2 inches of pan overlap the edges of the largest burner on my stove.  It also weighs something like 20 pounds. Not the most convenient piece of kitchen equipment.  After producing Alton's fried chicken (not my best effort), it's been used only a couple of times in five years (it works pretty well on the gas grill, though).

The first episode of Good Eats describes a stovetop/oven method for preparing ribeye steak and calls for a 12 inch cast iron pan.  I've been debating with myself the rules for my re-creation of these episodes, specifically on how closely I'm going to conform my efforts with what's seen in the show.  Hence, I had a bit of an internal crisis about whether I could use Ironzilla for the job or if I needed to go buy a 12 inch model. Then I thought about explaining to my wife that I needed to spend $30 right off the bat to be able to make this blog all that it can be.  Ironzilla would have to do.

There's not really a recipe in the show. The method shown is supposed to produce a juicy, tender steak with a crisp outer crust without the bitter, flame-induced char that results from the fat melting into an open flame.  All of this sounds good to me.  AB (Alton Brown, as he will henceforth be known) calls for two 15 ounce, boneless ribeye steaks, at least an inch and a half thick.  I have on hand two bone-in ribeyes, a bit less than an inch thick, weighing in at a bit over a pound (16 ounces) each.  (Local, grass-fed Missouri beef.)

Against my better judgment, I decided to bone the steaks to maintain consistency with the show.  Why I decided remove the flavorful, moisture-rich rib bones, we may never know.  After boning, and owing to the differing size of the bones, the two steaks were 12 and 16 ounces.  In retrospect, the thickness of the steaks was a much bigger problem for this application than the bones would have been.


The cast iron pan goes into the cold oven and preheated to 500 degrees. While it's heating the steaks get coated with a bit of canola oil and seasoned liberally with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. After moving the pan to the cooktop on high heat, the steaks go in for 30 seconds per side.

Side One (note use of phone timer)

Side Two

The pan and steaks then go back into the 500 degree oven for four more minutes (with another flip at the two minute mark).  This is supposed to result in a medium rare internal temperature of 135 or so.  Though I tried to shorten the cooking time a bit based on the thinness of my steaks, I still overshot the goal a bit.  I prefer my steaks on the rare side of medium rare, so this was disappointing.

Why are the steaks in a colander?  That's the other unique method AB describes, intending that the juice draining from the resting steaks (five minute rest required after cooking!), pools in the bowl under the colander instead of dissolving the crust that was the whole point of the cast iron method.  (The show's companion book includes a recipe for a cognac pan sauce using these drippings, but since I didn't have any cognac on hand, I skipped that one.)

Results:  The meat itself was very good. Very beefy flavor, and as you can see in the pictures above, a ton of marbled fat that kept the meat moist and tender, even cooked a bit more than I wanted.  The crisp crust was great, and there wasn't any of that burned fat flavor that you get from flare-ups on the grill.

That said, I'll probably stick with the grill as my main steak preparation method.  You don't have to deal with smoke alarms going off, you don't have a pan to clean up, you get cool grill marks, and you get to stand out on the deck with a cold beer and commune with nature.  (And don't get my wife started on the inanity of the resting set up.  Way too much to clean for marginal improvement in the meal.)

I mean, how could you give this up?